Dell Recalls Batteries Because of Fire Threat — Dell is recalling 4.1 million notebook computer batteries because they could erupt in flames, the company said today. This will be the largest safety recall in the history of the consumer electronics industry, the Consumer Product Safety Commission said.

Dell to recall 4.1 million laptop batteries — Devices' lithium-ion batteries could overheat and possibly catch fire … SAN FRANCISCO - Dell Inc., the world's largest personal computer maker, said Monday it would recall 4.1 million notebook computer batteries with cells made by Sony Corp., the largest recall in Dell's history.

Dell Details on Notebook Battery Recall — Alex Gruzen, Sr. VP - Mobility Product Group — Dell announced a recall today of lithium-ion batteries sold in many of our notebook computers over the past two years. You may have seen the recent New York Times story or have seen other details in the blogosphere.

Blogger.com unveils new beta version — Google's Blogger.com, one of the trailblazers of the whole medium, is about to undergo a substantial upgrade that will improve its usability and help it catch up to the state of the art. You can preview the beta version at beta.blogger.com …

Private Blogger Blogs Not So Secret — Google's Blogger, the grand daddy of the modern weblog publishing platform, today unveiled a new beta version that among other things touts enhanced privacy settings. For the first time on Blogger you can specify if a blog is public, private or by invitation only.

Advertisers Trace Paths Users Leave on Internet — If you use Yahoo's Web search engine to learn about hybrid cars, the site will quietly note that you fit into a group of users it calls "Consciously Cruising." — If you click on ads for moving van companies, you will join the "Home Hopping" group.

T-Mobile's Trial Balloon — The wireless provider is testing routers that will allow users to make calls from home via cell phone for a flat monthly rate — On Aug. 10, T-Mobile USA started a hush-hush trial of a service that could turn telecom on its head.

UK bank details sold in Nigeria — Bank account details belonging to thousands of Britons are being sold in West Africa for less than £20 each, the BBC's Real Story programme has found. — It discovered that fraudsters in Nigeria were able to find internet banking data stored on recycled PCs sent from the UK to Africa.

One-terabyte drive to debut later this year — If there's a storage fanatic in your family, a perfect gift could be coming for her or him toward the end of the year: 1-terabyte hard drives. — Desktop hard drives holding 1 terabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes, of storage will likely debut in 2006 …

Verizon to offer "Home Media DVR" to FiOS customers — If you're tired of waiting for DirecTV's continually-delayed HD DVR, or just one of the lucky few who actually have access to FiOS service (and want to extract every ounce of greatness from it), Verizon is looking to hook you up.

Apple Making Huge Social Software Push? — Update Added several points about upcoming Leopard features. — Several recent Apple developments suggest that the company is ramping up for a huge push of social features in its software: — Wiki Server — A wiki server? Yes, a wiki server.

Pirate Party Backs Speedy, Anonymizing Internet Service — As part of an ongoing campaign for privacy, PiratPartiet, the Swedish Pirate Party, are giving their backing to a new anonymizing service called Relakks, which, unlike proxies, promises no loss of speed on any internet service - including P2P.

Yahoo Taps ComScore Exec to Head Market Research — Yahoo has added a new senior-level executive to beef up its global market research team. — Peter Daboll, formerly the president and CEO of comScore Media Metrix, has been named Yahoo's chief of insights and head of global market research.

Open source project adds "no military use" clause to the GPL — GPU is a Gnutella client that creates ad-hoc supercomputers by allowing individual PCs on the network to share CPU resources with each other. That's intriguing enough, but the really interesting thing about GPU is the license its developers have given it.